The Trouble with Eden

by Lawrence Block

  By that line of reasoning, he didn’t have to be terrified of alcohol. He sipped now and then at his screwdriver, wondering as he did so how anyone could prefer the taste of it to that of pure orange juice, and when the glass was finally empty he let himself be talked into a second.

  He was enjoying himself, the drinks notwithstanding. He was pleased with the way the show had gone, and Warren’s praise had warmed him, however little of it had been sincerely meant. Warren had introduced him to the dermatologist and his wife as “the Harold Pinter—no, no, the Bryce Meredith—of theatrical lighting.” But Bryce had also complimented him on his efforts and Bryce was supposed to be a director who was generally sparing of praise.

  It felt nice just sitting here, being simultaneously alone and among friends. He was happy to let the conversation go on around him, and no one seemed to care that he wasn’t saying much of anything. Warren was carrying most of the conversation, as he generally did when he was in a manic phase; when the pendulum swayed the other way he generally kept to himself. He moved the ball around now, interspersing a running put-down of Arthur Miller with various numbers on absent members of the theatrical company.

  “Did you know that he actually thought Salesman was a comedy? He wrote it as a comedy and when he was all finished he read through it and thought it was a comedy. So he gave it to someone to read and they said ‘baby, this is tragic,’ and he thought, ‘Oh, then it’s a tragedy.’”

  “You are oversimplifying and—”

  “Oh, of course I am, Bryce. I don’t want to put us all to sleep, do I? But consider that play staged as comedy. Would you care for that job?”

  “I enjoy directing it traditionally.”

  “And you do it brilliantly, dear boy. No one denies it But the author saw it as a comedy! Now there are plays that work both ways. Hamlet, for example. Has there ever been a better comic character than Polonius? Those incredible gusts of pompous wind. And then the man is slain by mistake! Or the soliloquy, the famous and genuinely beautiful soliloquy, with its metaphors so thoroughly mixed it could have been written by a Waring blender, except that it transcends its own ridiculous elements. Imagine the soliloquy—”

  Peter faded out of the conversation, let the warmth and cadence of the voices soothe him without bothering to register the words.

  Warren fascinated him, and this fascination in turn worried Peter. Warren delighted in flaunting his homosexuality in a way Peter could not comprehend. He could understand people insisting on the right to be openly homosexual. He could similarly understand the Gay Militants with their “Gay Is Proud” slogan. But Warren’s approach took neither of these forms. He did not defend his rights so much as he took them for granted, and instead of exuding homosexual pride he managed at once to mock himself and the heterosexual world.

  Peter could never have carried it off, and knew it. Even when he had been able to accept himself as gay he had been unable to believe deeply that homosexuality was normal or respectable. Occasionally he worried that it was this disbelief that turned him away from male lovers and toward female ones. Most of the time he rejected this line of thought, feeling instead that homosexuality had been for him a logical developmental stage, a stage very much consistent with his personality and upbringing, but no more than a stage for him on the road to adult heterosexuality. He was not yet entirely secure enough to be comfortable when Warren vamped him. He knew that it was a game and not to be taken seriously, but like every game it had its serious aspects, and if Warren was kidding, he was also kidding on the square. And he would not be doing so if he did not think Peter was something of a prospect, and where there was smoke and all that, and Peter wished he were more confident that Warren was wrong.

  The first time he had not known what was happening. Later on he would imagine that he must have known, must have sensed what it was all about, but he was fourteen years old and drug-wise and sex-foolish, a fair and slender boy who hitchhiked back and forth from Newton every day after school because New Hope was where it was happening.

  He remembered the driver, remembered the upholstery of the car, remembered the sound of the man’s voice but could not summon up a picture of the face. The stream of questions—Did he like girls, did he like to jerk off—a line of patter he now knew was the ultimate seduction cliché but which he was being exposed to then for the first time.

  “There’s something that’s better than jerking off,” the man assured him. “Twice the fun and half the effort, and it’s not bad for you the way jerking off is.”

  This had interested him. He had always vaguely assumed there was something wrong with masturbating, but the pleasure was too great to pass up. Especially if you were stoned—the orgasm seemed to last for a month.

  “The only thing is I don’t know if you’re mature enough for it. You’d better let me see your cock.”

  Without a second thought he had opened his pants, produced his penis. The man’s hand, large and calloused, reached to stroke him. “Hey, that’s not bad at all for a guy your size,” he said admiringly. His fingers worked skillfully and Peter responded immediately. “Ah,” the man said. “You can really get it up there, can’t you? Hard as a fucking rock. You’re more of a man than I would have guessed.”

  The praise dispelled any doubts the boy might have had. The man turned the car onto a side road, found a parking space behind a clump of brush. “Now I’ll tell you what we’ll do. First show me how you jerk off, and then I’ll show you a way that’s ten times as good.”

  “And it’s really better for you?”

  “The best.”

  Peter reached to manipulate his penis. “No,” the man said. “No, show me on mine.” He opened his pants and exposed himself. His penis was much larger than Peter’s and was already erect. Peter envied it. He stroked the organ for a few seconds until the man moaned and had a powerful orgasm.

  “You are great,” the man said. “You are one great kid.” He caught his breath. “Now I’ll show you the better way,” he said, and leaned over to take Peter’s organ in his mouth and suck him.

  It was a complete surprise, he had never even heard of anything like this, and Peter’s initial reaction was panic; he thought the man was a lunatic who was going to bite his cock off. But the sensations banished the fear and overwhelmed Peter completely. The man was good, bringing him to the brink of orgasm and then shifting the pace until the boy was dizzy and breathless with the need to reach a climax.

  The orgasm, when it came, was indescribable.

  Afterward the man dropped him in New Hope and told him he was a great kid and a man’s man and gave him a dollar. Peter spent the dollar on three jays that he bought from a black kid who did a little small-time dealing around the high school. He couldn’t wait to find out what it would feel like behind grass.

  It wasn’t long before he found out. He never saw the first man again, but in less than a week he hitched a ride with another man with similar tastes. It was even better this time. In a way it wasn’t as exciting because this time he knew what to expect, but the grass enhanced it fantastically and of course this time he wasn’t afraid of having his penis bitten.

  He learned quickly, learned how to operate before he really knew what he was doing. He learned how to predict that a man would want to suck him and he learned how to make it evident that he could be safely approached. Something about it bothered him, something that many of the men projected, and he would try to give it up just as he had tried to give up masturbation, and with no greater success.

  Ultimately—he was surprised in retrospect that it took as long as it did—he met a man who wanted reciprocity. A man who sucked him well enough and then pulled out his own penis and demanded that Peter give what he had just received.

  “I never do that,” he said.

  “You do today,” the man said, and grabbed Peter by the hair.

  He struggled, but knew as he did so that he was going to do as the man desired. The man was twice his size and built like an ox, and Pe
ter knew the man could make him do anything he wanted.

  Besides, he wanted to know what it was like. All these men wanted to do it. What did they get out of it? What was it like to have a cock in your mouth and suck it? What did it feel like, what did it taste like?

  He had to do it, so here was the perfect excuse to find out.

  He found out he liked it.

  “… have to admit he attempts more than any other American playwright. The man tries.”

  “He tries my patience.”

  “He’s ambitious, Warren.”

  “Don’t you think you might be confusing ambition with pretense? God knows he selects the loftiest themes imaginable, but to praise him for that is like giving a man a medal for climbing fifty feet up Mount Everest. What’s so ambitious about coming out against witchhunts? And the analogy doesn’t even hold, you know. Those girls in Salem were witches. Damn silly reason to hang them, but facts are facts.

  “As far as ambition goes, the most ambitious thing the man ever did was marry Marilyn Monroe, and I don’t think he handled that so triumphantly. He did not do well by the lady, but then nobody did.”

  “You one of her fans, Warren?”

  “How could I be otherwise? A sexy waif and a born loser who always knew it. What self-respecting faggot can fail to respond to that? Garland, Monroe—”

  “Why is that, Warren?” This from Hugh.

  “Why the attraction? Lord, I don’t know. The usual argument is identification. Another one is that we hate women and want to see them fail, so we treasure the failures. Or that they embody (a) all the qualities the typical faggot’s mother lacked or (b) all the qualities she had. You pays your money and you takes your choice. None of it makes much sense to me. But we like the losers, the fey doomed ones. The Ophelias.”

  “What do you think of Miller, Hugh?”

  “I haven’t seen that many of his plays, and none of them recently. I remember enjoying A View from the Bridge.”

  “Better than most,” Warren conceded.

  “But I can’t really judge him, I’m afraid.”

  “You can judge him as a craftsman, can’t you?”

  “Oh, definitely not. Playwriting is a completely different discipline and one I know nothing about.”

  “You’ve never written a play?”

  “Wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “But your dialogue—”

  “Dialogue is a completely different matter on the stage and between book covers. It has an entirely different task to perform. In a book… .”

  Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe and Gretchen Vann.

  Was that how he had chosen her? A sexy waif and a born loser who always knew it. That was Gretch well enough. She was a loser, fey, doomed, and it was there in her haunted eyes in the best of times. Was that the aspect of her that had appealed to him?

  He wondered. In a way he had not chosen her at all. She had chosen him, warming to him that afternoon when he had stopped at her shop on the Towpath, keeping him there in bubbling conversation all afternoon, then taking him back to her apartment in the Shithouse and leading him promptly to bed.

  He’d never expected it would end in bed; when it did, he never thought it would lead to more than a quick tumble, of little good to either of them. He had not thought of her that way while they talked, probably because of the difference in their ages. He had been with girls before, perhaps half a dozen of them (although she was the first he ever lived with), but all his female sexual partners had been in his own age group.

  Perhaps that had made it easier for him to relax in her presence. They got to know each other through conversation uncomplicated by sexual overtones; the undertones were there but he wasn’t listening to them. He talked to her, more at ease with her than with any other man or woman, and he listened to her and was struck by her wit and warmth and verve.

  If she surprised him by taking him to bed, once there he surprised himself. Her body was exciting, soft skin over firm flesh, the curves of her hips, the sweet plain of her belly, but while recognizing this he felt no great desire for her. His detachment was cerebral; his loins had other ideas and wanted her with an urgent and yet confident potency he had never enjoyed before. He lay upon her and moved in and out of her warmth with long, deep, tantalizingly slow strokes, each movement heightening his passion but bringing him no closer to fulfillment. Her first orgasm thrilled him with a sense of heady masculine power; he had experienced nothing like it before. He thought he ought to stop, that she was finished and it would be boorish to continue. His body had other ideas and he went on thrusting at her and breathing the hot female smell of her. He moved faster and harder, hammering himself into her, and she quivered and moaned in serial orgasm until he emptied himself utterly into her.

  “Oh, baby,” she told him afterward, cuddling his head to her little breasts. “Baby, if I had the strength to move, I’d lock the door and swallow the key. I’ve got me a sweet young stud and I’m not letting go of him. Are you always so great? Be a gentleman and lie and tell me I had something to do with it.”

  “You had everything to do with it. It’s not a lie. It was … I can’t fit words to it.”

  “Baby says the sweetest things. Oh, I knew you’d be good for me the minute I saw you. You’re so beautiful and you turned me on so much, and I knew you would want me a little. But talk about beyond the lady’s wildest dreams. The sun and the moon and all the fucking stars. I don’t think I’ll ever let you out of this room. You can go but your cock stays right here.”

  “I want to keep it company.”

  “I’d never let it be lonely. Oh, my God! How can you be ready already? I have a feeling we’re going to screw all night. How do you want to do it? Think of a fantasy and we’ll work it out. Oh, just stay like that. Let me get on top, let Mama do the work. Baby worked hard and baby deserves a rest. God, you feel good inside me. You’re so beautiful. Do you like this? And this? Oh baby, Petey baby, you’re divine, you know that?”

  There were still times like that. They would go weeks without having each other, especially when drugs them too far inside their own heads for the sexual appat ratus to function. Then the mood would be suddenly right and they would take each other in frenzied coupling. At such times they thrilled each other as neither had ever been thrilled by anyone else. The rest of the world looked at them and saw a depraved older woman and a young man who lived off her; no one knew how tightly they were bound to each other.

  He had fled homosexuality before meeting her, preferring a sexless existence to a way of life that had grown increasingly uncomfortable and guilt-ridden. She made him aware of himself as a fully heterosexual being. And now, even knowing that he had to leave her, that she was tearing him apart, he realized what he owed her and how much he still seemed to require her.

  “Let me get on top. Let Mama do the work.”

  “… vacancy coming up at the Shithouse, so if you know anybody looking for a place—”

  “Dear dear Sully. Now how could I in all good conscience recommend that establishment to anyone? It should be condemned, you know.”

  “It’s a solid building. And it gives people what they need.”

  “So do the heroin peddlers.”

  “You know the longest I ever had a unit vacant? Ten days, and that was in the depths of winter.”

  “The depths of winter. Winter’s gloomy depths. Suleiman, you’re a closet poet.”

  Peter looked up. “A vacancy? Who’s moving out? Or are we evicted?”

  “I wouldn’t throw you two out. Hell, I love you people.”

  “Then who is it?”

  “What’s-his-name, Hillary. Top floor.”

  “Who told you they were moving?”

  “Well, he left town, didn’t he? I guess his girl’s still around the way I heard it, but she won’t be staying.”

  Peter shook his head. “She’s staying.”

  “Staying in New Hope? Who told you that?”

  “She did. A couple of
hours ago.”

  “And she’s keeping her room?”

  “For the time being. I don’t know how she can afford it. She works part time for Olive McIntyre and I don’t think she can be making more than twenty-five or thirty dollars a week.”

  “Maybe she’s got money of her own,” Sully suggested.

  “Well, maybe, but I have the impression she doesn’t.”

  “Which means I haven’t got a vacancy now but probably will in a couple of weeks. Well, that’s something to know. Very interesting. What’s her name again?”

  “Linda.”

  “That’s right, Linda. Not a bad-looking girl, either. Not bad at all. You wouldn’t know her last name by any chance? He took the place in his name, Hillary, so I never got her last name.”

  Peter had to think a moment. “Robshaw,” he said.

  “Linda Robshaw. Well, you’ll excuse me, but I just told some other people that I had a vacancy, and now I have to tell them that I don’t.”

  When Sully was out of earshot, Warren said, “The great hunter goes off to load his gun.”

  Hugh said, “Whoever Linda Robshaw is, it sounds as though she has a good shot at being the next Mrs. Jaeger. If she plays her cards right.”

  “If she plays them wrong, you mean. I’m afraid not, though.”

  “Isn’t he about due for a change?”

  Warren shrugged. “I don’t follow his career all that closely, but I think the current model still has a year or two left on it. He wouldn’t marry Linda, though. She’s too old. She must be around twenty-eight.”

  “He did look predatory,” the doctor said.

  “Ah, Sully the Magnificent was that, all right. He’ll try to screw her and he may well manage it. He’s sup posed to have a surprisingly good batting average that way.”

  The doctor’s wife said she couldn’t imagine why. “He’s not at all attractive. I certainly wouldn’t consider him attractive.”